Sorry, I know: it's all very Inside Baseball. And I just got through excoriating Automotive News for not publishing the Ford Taurus spy shot. And God knows TTAC is not perfect. (Ask me; I'm OCD.) But this website is nothing if not a bully pulpit for a certain otherwise unemployable automotive publisher/writer who considers the blurring of editorial and advertising about as defensible as Barry Manilow's Grammy Award for Copacabana. Anyway, the April 14th paper edition of AutoWeek contains a heavy cardboard, full-color, two-sided, pre-perforated advertisement for the Danbury Mint's $495 18" die-cast replica of the 1930 Cadillac V-16 Roadster. For some strange reason, page 22 offers a review of same by Jay Engel. The sub-head proclaims the toy– I mean, reproduction, a "work of art." Apparently, the Danbury Mint has launched "what some collectors who have seen the project up close consider to be the tour de force of Danbury 23 years of die-cast replication… From the gorgeous two-tone metallic green paint to the mechanical dazzle of the hallowed V16 engine to the cornucopia of functional features, this finely detailed replica does everything except burn gasoline." I gotta admit: it's a nice looking model. But AutoWeek's "review" is hardly what I'd call a model of editorial integrity.
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Honestly I’d rather go to a museum and see a car like this in person (even though you can’t touch them) than have a reproduction like this. What’s the point.
But a review on a model? What are they out of exotics to review? And TBH, people/marketing throw around things like “A Work of Art” so much nowadays that it hasn’t the same meaning.
Turning on the benefit-of-the-doubt tap to full force: it’s plausible that Autoweek was doing a review of said model, and approached Danbury to let them know what a good advertising opportunity this would be for them.
They were simply doing some good salesmanship?
I’m a Pierce-Arrow man myself. Darn V-16s are just a fad like those “zippers.”
$495?! That sounds closer to my budget for a REAL car. :P
It seems like all the car rags have done stories about Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, but you can still buy most of those for a buck each and it doesn’t seem so blatant.
Kman: it’s plausible that Autoweek was doing a review of said model, and approached Danbury to let them know what a good advertising opportunity this would be for them.
No it’s not. It’s not how things work in real life in the media.
Hey, I liked Copacabana! OCD — me too.
As for museums, I highly recommend the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, IN (northeast corner of the state). Lots of cool “motorcars” from what some consider the Golden Age. And not just A-C-Ds either; also Cadillacs, Lincolns, Pierce-Arrows, Ruxtons, Studebakers, and more. Also a few odd ducks like the Crosley and the proposed replacement for the IH Scout.
Whoa, $495? The Danbury Mint has gone upscale. I’m used to DB selling made-in-China glorified HotWheels for 39 bucks in Popular Mechanics.
That’s one expensive paperweight. At that price, I hope “functional features” means the cat can drive it around the living room.
As for seeing these in a museum, a local person here has a HUGE Caddy collection. He opens up his “farm” for one of the largest private car shows there is. http://www.fleetwoodcountrycruizein.com/ under the Private Collection link you will find his vehicle list, first one is the 30 V16 Roadster.
For it to be a work of art, it would need to have, say, Louis XVI at the wheel and Marie Antoinette eating cake in the passenger seat. That would make it art. Otherwise, it’s just a model, a fine piece of craft, not art.
I guess withthe auto industry taking a downturn, they needed to turn to new sources of payola. What next, a review of an herbal supplement Viagra substitute?
Owning models is a great way of showing your love for cars without an enormous expense. I have 800 or so model cars.
My brother sells diecast and it’s the more expensive ones that the buyers really go for. No one wants the ones that are under $100. Above that he sells every one he can get.
And Copacabana is a great song, why anyone would knock it is beyond me.
$500 might actually be cheap for a 1/12 scale quality diecast. Some cars made by GMP or CMC are well above that up to $2500.
davey49 :
April 11th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Owning models is a great way of showing your love for cars without an enormous expense. I have 800 or so model cars.
My brother sells diecast and it’s the more expensive ones that the buyers really go for. No one wants the ones that are under $100. Above that he sells every one he can get.
And Copacabana is a great song, why anyone would knock it is beyond me.
$500 might actually be cheap for a 1/12 scale quality diecast. Some cars made by GMP or CMC are well above that up to $2500.
You have 800 model cars? To each his own, but what exactly do you do with them? I’m just baffled as to why one would want to spend so much money on something seemingly so useless.
Then again, I don’t understand why women buy so many knick-knacks or flowers…
@ 210delray
If you are going to be in that part of the Midwest and don’t mind going farther east, I highly recommend the Case Western Museum in Cleveland. They have some very nice cars on display, not just Wintons and other Cleveland makes.
Yep, and 800 cars is with a fairly limited budget. A lot are cheap Matchbox type cars. I’m sure I’d have at least 3 times that if I had a higher budget.
They’re a lot like knick-knacks. it’s pretty much the same thing.
Some mint, in-box Matchbox cars from the 1950s and 1960s are worth well over $100 (and the really rare variations can top $1,000 in mint condition), so buying them now, and leaving them in the original packaging, may not be a bad bet.
FYI, a story I did for the Detroit News (yes, the Detroit News) a while back… In 1991, Steven Cinnamon went to Toys R Us to buy some Hot Wheels for his newborn son. Suddenly, the 38-year-old’s casual interest in die-cast cars mutated into something altogether more serious. “It hit me all at once,” Cinnamon remembers. “I felt I had to buy every variation of every car. It got so I’d go down to my local K-Mart a couple of times an hour to check for new cars. Other guys were there too, waiting for re-stock. I remember seeing one collector at five in the morning with a carton of melted ice cream in his trolley. He’d been there all night.” It’s true: collecting die-cast cars can be addictive. While most buyers are young boys, there’s a significant adult subculture whose passion for die-cast cars borders on full-blown mania. The majority of these collectors focus their attention on one brand: Hot Wheels. Hot Wheels controls just over half of America’s $550 million die-cast car business. Since Mattel launched the brand in 1968, the company has sold over three billion cars worldwide. More specifically, they’ve unleashed 800 models with 11,000 variations. This staggering, never-ending variety of cars fuels the adult collectors market. Quite simply, most Hot Wheels collectors want them all. Over the past 15 years, Jim Wilson has assembled a Hot Wheels collection containing over 20,000 cars. The 59-year-old Belleville resident says he’s a “reformed completist” — more or less. “I used to buy 12 of everything,” Wilson admits. “Now I just buy one.” By his own reckoning, Wilson has spent over $50,000 on Hot Wheels. Recently, financial circumstances have forced the retired die-setter to change his tactics. “I used to spread my money around,” Wilson says. “Now I’m a patient man. I wait until I find someone who doesn’t know what they’ve got, or is desperate for the money. Then I’ll trade them one of my duplicates. I always get my car.” Collector Matthew McMullen of Taylor distances himself from the Hot Wheels “completist.” “I don’t need to own six different wheel variations of the exact same car,” McMullen maintains. “I just buy the basic car.” Even so, the 32-year-old DaimlerChrysler forklift driver felt compelled to buy every car in Hot Wheels’ Red Line Club 2002 Collector’s Series. He recently paid $159 for the final piece in the set: a VW “drag bus” given away at the Hot Wheels national convention in Reston, Va. The VW now occupies pride of place among the 3,800-plus cars in McMullen’s Hot Wheels room. Yes, an entire room in McMullen’s home is devoted to Hot Wheels. The quest for Mattel’s miniature motors has “challenged” many a collector’s marriage. After “a bit of grief”, McMullen’s wife, Marcy, gradually accepted her husband’s $100 per week habit. Other collectors aren’t so lucky. “Some people skim money off their pay checks to go out and buy Hot Wheels,” McMullen says. “They keep them in the car and bring them in little by little so their wife doesn’t know — one or two guys’ marriage didn’t make it.” Adult Hot Wheels aficionados realize that the general public considers their collecting habits slightly strange and obsessive. Builder Douglas Welch of Roseville has over 2,500 Hot Wheels stashed in a spare bedroom. He defends his Hot Wheels hobby as child-friendly … stress relief. “I play with my cars for at least a half hour every day,” he says. “There’s no phone calls, no money to worry about, no headaches. You can’t underestimate the simple pleasure of acting like a little kid for a while.” McMullen also defends his collecting from the scorn of the uninitiated. He says Hot Wheels collecting is both the lesser of many evils, and a family-friendly pursuit. “Some guys blow hundreds of dollars a week at strip clubs, or hit the bar every night,” McMullen says. “I come home after a hard day’s work and spend 45 minutes with my cars, checking e-Bay for auctions, winding down — It’s not that bad a habit. At least I’m home and it’s interactive — I play Hot Wheels with my son Myles, 4, every morning before work.” While many people may struggle to understand the fever that grips adult Hot Wheels collectors, most men, at least, can draw upon childhood memory for at least a modicum of sympathy. According to Mattel, more than 15 million boys age 3 to 10 currently own an average of fifty cars each. Even if puberty dooms these collections to some dusty corner of the attic, these proto-collectors will arrive into adulthood with their subconscious programmed to accept the “Hot Wheels attitude”. According to legendary Hot Wheels designer Larry Wood, you can already see the effects in the “real world” of automotive design. “Hot Wheels are all modified versions of standard cars,” Wood says. “And all our cars’ wheels are out of proportion to the rest of the design. In other words, they’re big. Well, look at the kids all putting those huge wheels on their SUV’s and sedans. And more and more cars are using hot rod-style detailing to differentiate themselves from standard models. “I definitely think there’s a connection between what we do at Hot Wheels and how kids eventually want their grown-up car to look.” Does that mean that Hot Wheels collectors’ mania springs from the fact that they’re in touch with some deep design gestalt that the rest of us forgot? Not according to the collectors. “I just love cars,” says Steve Cinnamon. “How else can you buy all the cars you’d want to own?”
My son and I have maybe 10 of the 1/16 diecast cars sprinkled around the house. I watch for the real oddball cars that I like in real life and will likely never own in person. So far I have been able to get most of them on clearance or just plain cheap. Alot of the cars are foreign market cars that interest me that friends and family don’t easily recognize like the original Fiat 500.
No insurance, no garage space and they are interesting looking parked next to favorite books or CDs.
I could never bring myself to pay huge money $500+ for a model car. I have driven too many real cars that I paid less for over the past 20 years. VBG! $500+ for me better equip it with working lights, suspension, steering and a miniature gas engine with R/C controls. Even then I’d be too afraid to drive it. VBG!
I find model cars interesting in that you can admire the line of a car by holding it in your hand and looking at it from every angle, something you can’t do with the real thing.
One of my favorite cars is the 1973 Lancia Stratos that was used to win the World Rally Championship and was also raced in a few endurance series. It’s a car that was made in limited quantities and very few of them have survived. I do have a model of one and I can look and admire it all I want at a cost of about $10.
RF- I actually think I remember that story.
I can’t stand Hot Wheels because they look ridiculous, I like models that look like original cars, but I will confess to having a few Jadas.
Model train people are way crazier than Hot Wheels people. :-)
I don’t have a model of my ION but I do have one of my 2003 L-series.
Or you could buy a used Cadillac for $495.
OK, bear with me as I am new here.
As for why anyone would want to own these? Why does anyone own anything? Because they want to.
Jag collectors will look at a rolls collector and say why would you want such a useless car. Because the rolls owner wants it.
The diecast business is a multi BILLION dollar a year business and can range from Hot Wheels toys to high detailed scratch built museaum quality cars that like stamps or any other such collectible item, people collect.
Take for instance, John Shirley. He owns a very famous Ferrari…the only one made of this particular body style. It is a Ferrari 375 MM “Rossellini” coupe. The car has history, trust me. But he wanted a scaled model of it for his collection. He doesn’t drive the full size one, nor can he drive the 1/12th scale model that was hand crafted by a friend of mine, Marshall Buck. Now you think this Caddy is high priced at $495? Try nearly $100,000 USD!!! It took Marshall over 3 years to build it. Do a google search on Creative Miniature Associates Inc. to see what I mean.
But this is the exception to the rule. Diecast cars are like any other hobby. People collect them and enjoy having a mini museum. The reasons are simple…most of the time, the models they have amassed are reminders of special times growing up or possibly a sincere love of the automobile or an era of it.
It started that way for me. Nearly 15 years ago I started collecting 1/18th scale based on one model, a 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 429. Why? It was just like the one my brother owned when I was young. I have always been a muscle car freak and before I knew it, I also had a collection of 600 cars. But here’s the rub…I had $6000 invested and grew tired of the hobby. I sold all but 30. When it was all said and done, the value climbed and I was sitting with $32,000. Not bad.
But since then, I have been collecting 1/24th scale and a few errant larger 1/12th and 1/10th scales. There are hobby magazines dedicated to the hobby of collecting diecast including the newest one that is about to mail, The Car Room Magazine (google it!).
I have written about them and been involved in producing them as well as a collector. While it may not be your cup of tea, to those that follow the hobby, it is.
to see the Ferrari, google Creative Miniature Associates Inc.
To see the magazine I talked about, google The Car Room Magazine.